Focusing on the 25-year body of knowledge produced by studies on literacy skills in social studies education, the current study determines the trends of articles published in international journals. After the evaluation process, we reached 114 articles published between 1996 and 2020, which met our criteria and examined literacy skills in social studies education. We used bibliometric analysis and descriptive content analysis methods to systematically evaluate the articles. The bibliometric analysis results revealed that few studies were conducted on the relevant subject between 1996 and 2006, whereas there was a huge increase in the number of studies after 2006. We also found that most of the studies were conducted in the USA and that the articles were mostly published in journals about social studies education and literacy. Our content analysis results revealed that most of the studies used qualitative research methods and that pre-service teachers were usually selected as samples.